In this week's New Statesman: The family in peril

Frank Field: From cradle to grave

On the 70th anniversary of the landmark Beveridge report Social Insurance and Allied Services, the blueprint for the postwar welfare state, the Labour MP Frank Field asks why the vision set out by Sir William Beveridge and Clement Attlee failed and how its fundamental principles might be revived.

“The challenge for the Labour Party today,” Field writes, “is to use the 70th anniversary of the Beveridge report to rethink the means-tested social security strategy that dominated the last Labour government. That strategy has imprisoned the party in an approach which threatens to destroy the Attlee vision of the welfare state.”

Labour, he argues, ought to reassert the principle of insurance-based welfare that was at the heart of Beveridge’s plan. “There is much in our political culture that supports such a change. There has always been a deep longing on the centre left for a virtuous polity, and support for the view that citizenship is more substantial if it is tied to certain public functions . . .”

Field proposes, as part of a Labour welfare reform package, “national schemes to ensure that, whatever the level of benefit they may be receiving, claimants can again begin to build on their provision without being penalised for doing so”.

On the coalition government’s Welfare Reform Act:

[The new] system of universal credit . . . will replace the existing system of working-age benefits and tax credits with a single payment . . . It entrenches means testing more firmly in our welfare system. Yet Labour’s line is to support this reform. It does so without any clear thought as to where the strategy will lead us or what our goals should be.

PLUS: In a short profile accompanying Field’s essay, Jonathan Derbyshire looks back at the NewStatesman’s reactionto the publication of the Beveridge report in 1942:

The New Statesman offered a robust welcome to [the report. The magazine] looked “highly favourably” on Beveridge’s proposals. If Sir William were to get his way . . . we would see an end to the “long-tolerated scandal of the exploitation of the poor by insurance companies” and the introduction of a “guaranteed income” for every working person when he or she fell sick, was injured at work or became unemployed.

Liam Byrne: "Labour can win on social security"

In an exclusive interview, Liam Byrne sets out Labour’s strategy to take the fight back to the Tories on welfare, telling Rafael Behr: “Labour can win on social security.” The shadow work and pensions secretary predicts that the public mood around benefit cuts is about to change.

“The Tories have crossed the threshold of decency,” he says. “They’re very good at conjuring up another vulnerable group to kick the crap out of.”

Labour, Byrne says, will expose how the real price of deficit reduction and recession is being paid by working families. Stealing one of David Cameron’s favourite terms, he claims Labour can win the welfare debate by siding with the “strivers”:

“It’s not Britain’s shirkers who are having to pay the cost of failure, it’s Britain’s strivers,” he says. “The Tories are screwing Britain’s strivers . . . As working people feel the kicking they’re going to get next year and as they see the way our country becomes divided, they’re going to recoil. It will remind them of the things they rejected about the Tories in 1997.”

Byrne draws the outline of Labour’s own reform plans, with “switch spends” aimed at supporting families “who feel short-changed” by the existing welfare system. That means diverting resources from housing benefit to investment in social housing and away from unemployment benefit to help with child care and social care.

To win public trust, says Byrne, Labour will still need to put out “hard-edged” messages on the responsibility to work. “You’ve got a responsibility to work if you can and if you don’t work, we’ll stop your benefits – it’s as simple as that,” he says.

Laurie Penny: The Coalition's war on the disabled and the desititue

In an impassioned column, Laurie Penny rails against the government-endorsed vilification of those on disability benefits. “Those who’ve been fighting this cause for years are sick and tired of repeating the arguments and watching the public conversation about disability slide backwards into hate and suspicion.”

Laurie talks to a group of hunger strikers – disabled benefit recipients fighting to regain their dignity following unjust cuts to their much-needed state support:

A hunger strike is a supreme act of willpower. It’s a desperate attempt to wrest back dignified control of your own body when your dignity and control have been confiscated . . .

The hunger strikers have assumed – as most of us did, until very recently – that the government gives a damn about whether or not very poor, sick people die early and in pain. Given recent pronouncements by the Department for Work and Pensions, this may be a dangerous assumption. An all-out assault has been under way against the disabled and the unemployed, rewriting the social script in this country so that the needy are no longer full human beings but scroungers, burdens on the state.

ELSEWHERE IN THE MAGAZINE

Julie Bindel: In love with a death row dandy

What would prompt a woman to marry a convicted killer and rapist? Our reporter at large Julie Bindel travels to Florida to find out. For her provocative piece, she meets the spouses of death row inmates, speaks with psychologists, and draws on her own reportage of sex tourism and the “eroticisation of otherness” to get to the bottom of these surprisingly common couplings. She begins:

Rosalie Bolin, a legal advocate on behalf of death row inmates, is here to visit a rapist and serial killer of women. But this man is not her client. Oscar Bolin is her husband. They married in 1996 and said their vows over the phone. She wore a wedding dress and sat in her apartment and he wore his prison-issue orange boiler suit in his death row cell.

Bright, articulate and immediately likeable, Rosalie is a passionate campaigner against state execution. It was in this role that she first met Bolin. He had been a drifter, a carnival worker and a long-distance trucker, had dealt in drugs and had pleaded guilty to a vicious gunpoint rape in 1988 . . .

Women involved with men on death row trot out explanations for why their marriages are not so different from the rest – that most marriages are loveless and sexless, anyway; that many couples do not spend much quality time together. They often tell you, as a “joke”, that at least men on death row do not cheat on their wives.

She [Rosalie] says that she identifies with Bolin, comparing her life as an unhappy socialite with his own as a neglected and abused child, violent criminal and now death row inmate.

“I felt his isolation, his confinement, his loneliness. It affected me because I felt the same way,” she says.

. . . During my time in Starke, I began to see these women similarly to the white female sex tourists in Jamaica on whom I once did some research. The class privilege is all too apparent, as is the eroticisation of “otherness” and the image of the caged beast looking for its saviour. It is easy to tell the “death row divas” from the veterans. The women who have been with the men from before their convictions often appear to be poor and suffering from mental and physical ill-health. The tourists are sweet-smelling, well dressed and, invariably, white. They talk of having “rescued” men whom no one else wants.

Mehdi Hasan: Ignore the neocons - I refuse to give up on Egypt, or the Arab Spring

“Over the past year or so, the doom-mongers and naysayers of the western commentariat have fallen over one another to try to write the definitive obituary of the Arab revolts,” writes Mehdi Hasan in Lines of Dissent.

He considers the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, who on 22 November issued a decree granting himself sweeping powers, resulting in mass protests across the country:

I concede that recent events in Egypt don’t help those of us who desperately want to be optimistic about the future of the region,” Hasan writes. “But I refuse to give up on Egypt – or, for that matter, the Arab spring. Not yet, at least.

For a start, shouldn’t we be celebrating the backlash against Morsi’s decree and how instant it was? The president’s power grab was not just illegitimate, but ill-judged. His justice minister, Ahmed Mekky, went on television to object to the scope of the decree. The one-time presidential candidate and Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, a hero of Egypt’s liberal minority, took to Twitter to accuse Morsi of usurping “all state powers” and appointing himself “Egypt’s new pharaoh”.

As Egypt’s top judges threatened to go on strike, thousands of protesters gathered in Tahrir Square on 27 November, repeating the chant that became the defining slogan of the demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak: “The people want the downfall of the regime.”

Second, at the time of writing, the backlash looks like it might be working. Morsi has begun to perform a David-Cameron-type U-turn, claiming his new powers are much narrower and more temporary than the announcement originally indicated.

This pharaoh, it seems, isn’t immune to political or popular pressure. Remember: just 21 months have elapsed since the fall of Mubarak, who ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years, and just five months since the election of Morsi. “It’s going to take some time” for Egypt to adapt to democracy, says [H A] Hellyer [a research fellow at the Brookings Institution], who lives in Cairo. “There was always going to be a lot of trauma."

Rafael Behr: The Tories flirting with Ukip are listening to the siren lure of unelectable purity

In the Politics Column this week, Rafael Behr turns his attention towards the political organisation du jour – the UK Independence Party (Ukip). What appeal do they hold for Conservatives dissatisfied with the Prime Minister, and what would be the dangers of joining forces with Nigel Farage?

Some ideas in politics are so bad that even disavowing them is getting too close. The notion of the Tories forming an electoral pact with the UK Independence Party is one . . .

This fringe flirtation springs from ideological affinity. Farage says aloud things about Europe and immigration that many Tories think but feel are taboo in Cameron’s party. When the Tory leader described Ukip as a haven for “loonies, fruitcakes and closet racists” in 2006, he told a number of his MPs, in effect, that their career prospects were over on his watch.

The problem, as Cameron knows, is that the Tories failed to win a majority in 2010 because too many voters imagined them a bit too Faragey already – all claret-faced in disgust at modern Britain. It is hard to see how inserting the real Farage into their 2015 manifesto will change those sceptical minds.

Dissident Conservatives argue that the economic crisis has changed the political landscape. There is, they say, a new appetite for right-wing populism and departure from the EU, as shown by opinion polls and Ukip’s harrying of mainstream parties in by-elections. The flaw in that argument is that it doesn’t distinguish between what voters feel on single issues and how ardently they feel it. Europhobia doesn’t damage the Tories because voters love the EU. They don’t. It hurts them by signalling a relapse into manias from the party’s most unattractive years.

And what of the Liberal Democrats? The Conservative flirtation with Ukip could work in their favour, Behr argues:

Every tender glance that Cameron’s MPs throw at Ukip is a tactical boost for the Lib Dems.

“They really are the British Tea Party,” says one Clegg ally. “They’ve been allowed to grow because they once served a useful purpose but now it’s out of control."

David Blanchflower: Why Osborne has got it right... for once

On George Osborne’s appointment of Mark Carney – governor of the Bank of Canadaand chairman of the G20’s financial stability board – to the chief role at the Bank of England, David Blanchflower writes:

I don’t agree with much of anything the Chancellor does but this time is different. I congratulate George Osborne for getting his man. The appointment is a triumph for him . . .

Bringing in an outsider was always the right thing to do, as Alistair Darling recommended months ago, given the failings at both the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority. The failure of Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland appears to have been a complete surprise, and the Bank failed to spot a huge asset bubble and acted too late to prevent disaster . . .

The last thing we needed was for the bookies’ favourite, Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank, to get the top job. He had failed to spot the recession or the double dip and was finally done in by his problems over the fixing of the LIBOR rate. Other contenders did not have Carney’s credentials; none would have received the universal acclaim that greeted his appointment.

In The Critics

In The Critics this week, John Gray reviews Why Tolerate Religion? by the American political philosopher Brian Leiter, Leo Robson reviews Julian Barnes’s essay collection Through the Window , Kate Mossman reviews Kylie Minogue’s Abbey Road Sessions, and our Critic at Large Talitha Stevenson writes on why the pathologies of modern life now take forms that we used to associate with creative writers (i.e. writers block).

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.